October Beans

We stopped last week to buy apples at a big farm stand near Hendersonville, and among all the lovely apples and beets and ornamental squashes and tough, late-season green beans were a few bags of dried, shelled beans marked "dried October shellies." They were available in pods, too, by the handful: half-dried, twisted pods, beautifully mottled with pink and creamy white swirls. The beans, too, were pink and white. I cannot resist beans, so I bought some.

I did some research at home. My cookbooks were little help; the only people writing about these beans (which go by the names October beans, shelly beans and -- get this -- horticultural beans) seem to have ties to Appalachia and heirloom seeds. These beans seem to be grown mostly in parts of the rural, mountainous South and Midwest. They can be eaten fresh or dried. The pods are edible, too -- people chop them up and put them in soups for flavor.

I cooked them very simply, Southern-style: a few hours of soaking, followed by cooking with two slices of chopped up, rendered bacon, a dried red chile, water and a drizzle of honey. They cooked more quickly than older dried beans.

Surprisingly, they taste very much like pinto beans. I expected a more crowder-pea-like, brassy flavor, or maybe something creamier and lighter like an Italian cannellini.

We ate them mostly plain with cornbread and sauteed spinach that night. We had them left over for lunch. And yesterday -- five days later -- I cooked the rest of them with some tomatoes, rosemary, dried red chiles and garlic and such and served them over linguine. I like Italian bean pastas a lot.

Cooking Frenzy

I got fired up today and made granola, blueberry jam, and an Italian supper of salmon, fettucine with peas and saffron, and yellow peppers with mint.

I think this is happening because I'm happy to be home after being away for four of the last six weeks; and also because I've started a regimen of piano practice for a September program, and I love to alternate practice with cooking, just like I did when you were a baby.

The granola was a Joy of Cooking recipe with no sugar or salt, just toasted oatmeal with nuts and dried fruits. I'm looking forward to it for breakfast tomorrow with yogurt.

Blueberries are one dollar a pint now. We've stuffed in all the fresh ones we can eat, so I made a small batch of microwave jam.

In this hot summer weather I turn to Mediterranean recipes. My current favorites are Viana La Place's Verdura and Mireille Johnstons's Cuisine of the Sun.

The pasta was real Italian fettucine, so good after the whole wheat and rice pastas I've been trying to use. Saffron, peas, and green onions were delicious together, garnished with fresh basil. This was also a Viana La Place recipe.

Here is La Place's yellow pepper recipe. I couldn't handle her advice to garnish the peppers with raw garlic, so I added the garlic to the skillet for a few minutes at the end of the cooking time.



Fried Yellow Peppers with Mint
2 fat yellow or orange bell peppers
3 tablespoons olive oil
Salt to taste
2 tablespoons red wine vinegar
1 large clove garlic, thinly sliced
2 tablespoons chopped fresh mint

Trim the peppers and sliver them lengthwise. Heat the olive oil until very hot and add the peppers, stirring until they have brown spots. Reduce heat, add salt, and cook covered until they are tender. A minute or so before they are done, stir in the garlic.

Off heat, add the vinegar, check seasoning, and stir in the mint. Serve at room temperature.

Italian Sausage

For Christmas a few years ago, Lawson gave me a grinder attachment for my KitchenAid. This year, he gave me the sausage horn attachment, a hank of hog casings, and a book on sausage-making. So I was finally all set to make sausage.

The grinder is funny: I tried it for cranberry-orange relish last year, but it was no good -- it made the relish too wet and gooey, and I ended up using my hand cranked old metal grinder from the flea market instead. But for meat, the grinder was perfect. I used the coarser grind plate, and everything went quickly and smoothly.

Italian sausage recipes are surprisingly simple and similar to each other. This was roughly what I used:

3.5 pounds of pork butt, cut off the bone
1 pound of fatback
2 tablespoons fennel seeds
1 tablespoon minced garlic
1 tablespoon pepper
kosher salt
1 tablespoon red chile powder
1 tablespoon red pepper flakes
1/4 cup vermouth

I used too much salt at first and had to go buy another pound of lean pork to grind in. I used the amount of salt called for in the main recipe I was following, 4 teaspoons, but it turned out the fatback was salted, and it threw everything off.

I fried up several little samples of the sausage throughout the process to make sure everything was tasting right.

So I ground everything together and put it back in the fridge. I would have liked to have stuffed it that day but had to wait another day, and the meat got kind of stiff and hard to stuff.

I rinsed out four casings by putting them over the faucet and running water through them.


To stuff a sausage, I had to thread an entire casing, all three or four feet of it, onto the sausage horn, which was attached to the grinder with its plate and knife removed. I then started piling meat into the hopper and pushing it down with a little wooden stomper. Once the initial air was pushed out and there was an inch of meat in the casing, I tied the end of the sausage and started stuffing.

It took a long time, and quite a bit of skill and feel. My sausages were passable, but they weren't all that pretty. I would stuff each casing full, then section it off and twirl the sausages to seal them into links. I set them in the fridge overnight to cure, then packed them in freezer bags.

They taste a little salty still, and a little lean -- that extra pound of meat I had to add upset the balance a bit. They could have used more fennel, too. But they are delicious. We grilled a few the first night. I froze the rest. We took some to the mountains this weekend and made pasta with tomatoes, red pepper, onions, and sausage.
All very good.

Next time I'll try something I can smoke, like andouille. And I want to perfect the Italian sausage recipe.

Spaghetti alla Carbonara

I got a pretty kitchen scale for my birthday.

I have of course read a lot about spaghetti alla carbonara, but I'd never tried it. Never knew quite what to think. But Emile was selling pancetta at the farmers market the other week, so we bought some and made spaghetti with pancetta and eggs and cheese.

I have to say, it wasn't my thing. Even with tons of parsley, which Lawson said correctly was key to the dish, it lacked any redeeming green-ness. It was too intense. Lawson, who has made it many times before, didn't like the pancetta as much as the plain old bacon he's used before.

I have used the pancetta since in other ways, and it's glorious. I cooked it with some collards last week. But maybe not so much with the eggs and parmesan and pasta.

Bruschetta

Here's a meal I served Katherine after we picked her up at the airport last night: chicken in red wine sauce, bruschetta, and asparagus, with blueberries and ice cream for dessert.

The ice cream was low fat latte flavor by Starbucks--I love coffee ice cream, and Starbuck's is consistently excellent.

My latest cookbook is Verdura: Vegetables Italian Style by Viana La Place. In it I was thrilled to find a whole chapter on bruschetta toppings. The one pictured above had artichokes, capers, and olives.

Perfect Italian Broccoli

Here's a recipe for simple and delicious broccoli from my new Viana La Place cookbook (slightly modified, as usual), served in my new serving bowl, and written up on my new computer (first in 5 years -- hooray).

Heat over medium low, stirring until anchovies are melted:
- 1/4 cup or less olive oil
- 1 small fresh or dried red chile pepper, chopped, or 1/2 teaspoon crushed red pepper
- 3 anchovy fillets from a small can

Remove from heat. Steam or boil until tender:

- 1 bunch broccoli, trimmed and separated (I like to include lots of sliced stem)

Drain and toss in pan with anchovied oil and the following:

- Juice of 1/2 lemon, about 2 tablespoons
- Salt
- Pepper

Thanks for the lovely bowl and cookbook, Mom.

Southern Italy and the Southern US

On Sunday I made:

• Tuscan Baked Cannellini Beans with Rosemary and Garlic. The recipe came from the Jack Bishop Italian Vegetarian book you gave me for my birthday. It was awesome, although next time I will probably use the crockpot instead of the prescribed Dutch-oven-in-the-oven, because I would like my beans a little bit moister.


• Fennel and Orange Salad with Mint and Olives, also from the Bishop book. The taste was phenomenal, but I didn't like the size and shape of the orange and fennel pieces as dictated by the recipe -- the oranges were in big rounds, beautiful but hard to handle, and the fennel was in weird chunks.


• Piadina, a Roman flatbread I have probably mentioned before.
  


• Collards cooked for five hours with some smoked pork neckbones.

I liked the way the collards fit right in with the three Italian dishes. A very balanced meal, all in all.

More on collards very soon...

Good Things in the Kitchen

I did some good things in the kitchen yesterday. I made a batch of pear chutney. I also browned a small, tough beef round steak along with carrots, onions, and celery, then simmered it all afternoon to make beef stock. I made the meat into dog food, and tonight I'm going to make French Onion Soup with the broth! I feel very self-congratulatory about this planning ahead.

Dad picked some beautiful greens for tonight's salad. Salad and soup will be enough, because we ate an Italian lunch in downtown Tucson while attending the Tucson Art Museum Art Fair. The restaurant was odd: they had a very limited menu, just ravioli, linguini, or rigatoni, but it was excellent, and the delicious wine was served in the most elegant tall glasses. The building was about as old as you'll find in the West, very thick old adobe.

Piedmont Peppers and Polenta

I forgot to include this photo of our wonderful Piedmont Peppers from the weekend. The recipe is in Rustic Italian Cooking by Kathleen Sloan. Everyone should own this cookbook. You can buy a barely used copy at amazon.com for a couple of dollars and spend weeks happily cooking your way through the book.

Italian Cravings

We planned to take Grandma to our favorite Italian restaurant on Sunday night, but it wasn’t open! The yen for Italian food didn’t go away over the weekend, so I tried to make up for it a home. First we sat outside around the chiminea and had a margarita—okay, that’s all Southwestern so far—but when it got dark, we came in for our first course of prosciutto and melon. It’s rare to get a great honeydew melon, but we were lucky. “Monica’s Pride” from Mexico, the label said. There must be something wrong with me, because that label always makes me think of boobs. With it we had whole wheat focaccia with walnuts, sage, and parmesan.

Our main course was chicken breasts stuffed with goat cheese and sun-dried tomatoes; penne with pesto; and broccoli. Dessert was Meyer lemon bars. I have tried to make a lemon tart with this recipe, but the 9x9 Pyrex works better.

Here are Classic Lemon Bars:

1 cup flour
¼ cup powdered sugar
2 tablespoons finely grated lemon zest
Pinch of salt

1/2 cup butter, cut in cubes

Butter a 9-inch square baking pan. Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Process first four ingredients to mix. Add butter and process until mixture resembles coarse crumbs, then begins to come together into a dough.

Press into baking pan. Bake for about 25 minutes, or until light golden brown. Set aside to cool slightly while making filling.

1 ½ cups powdered sugar
2 tablespoons flour
½ teaspoon baking powder

3 eggs

3 ½ ounces lemon juice
(7 tablespoons, about 2 large lemons)

Mix dry ingredients and set aside.

In a large bowl, beat eggs at high speed for about 2 minutes. Add dry ingredients, mixing just until combined, and then stir in lemon juice.

Pour over crust and return to oven for about 20 minutes, or until the filling is just set in the center.

You may sprinkle with more powdered sugar before cutting into squares to serve.

The Recipe Proselytizer

Writing this blog has helped me with a personal problem: I’m a hopeless recipe-pusher, insisting that people try things and blabbing about the wonderfulness of various foods and recipes. Right now it’s collard love, a condition I caught from you, sort of like cooties. I’m bringing the side dishes to dinner at Grandma’s tonight, and I am pressing collards upon her. The menu will be beef stew and homemade bread by Grandma, and collard greens and lemon meringue pie by me.

We had turkey broth-based minestrone for dinner last night. We had a late Italian lunch, so that’s all we needed. At lunch I split two dishes with Juliana—stuffed eggplant (grilled, not fried) and a shrimp scampi salad, and Dad had mixed grilled things over polenta. Red wine. Delicious, and we didn’t get much else done that day.

I made one of our favorite breakfasts this morning, Tomato Cheese Toasts, which I think I invented. First, toast a slice of bread; spread with mustard; add a slice of mild cheese, then a tomato slice or two with salt and pepper; and top with sharp cheese, like bleu or parmesan. Broil for five minutes or so, until browned and bubbly. I have a picture here, but it’s not as beautiful as it tastes.